Saturday, March 25, 2006

The funny thing about a lot of the people who claim to be 'Enterprise Architects' is that I've come to realize that they tend to seek complex solutions to relatively simple problems. How else do you explain the fact that web sites that serve millions of people a day and do billions of dollars in business a year like Amazon and Yahoo are using scripting languages like PHP and approaches based on REST to solve the problem of building distributed applications while you see these 'enterprise architect' telling us that you need complex WS-* technologies and expensive toolkits to build distributed applications for your business which has less issues to deal with than the Amazons and Yahoos of this world?

Dare goes on to say:

I was chatting with Dion Hinchcliffe at the Microsoft SPARK workshop this weekend and I asked him who the audience was for his blog on Web 2.0. He mentioned that he gets thousands of readers who are enterprise developers working for government agencies and businesses who see all the success that Web companies are having with simple technologies like RSS and RESTful web services while they have difficulty implementing SOAs in their enterprises for a smaller audience than these web sites. The lesson here is that all this complexity being pushed by so-called enterprise architects, software vendors and big 5 consulting companies is bullshit. If you are building distributed applications for your business, you really need to ask yourself what is so complex about the problems that you have to solve that makes it require more complex solutions than those that are working on a global scale on the World Wide Web today.

I guess that this gets to my point. Most people who have never seen a large enterprise architecture have no concept of what it is. I'm not trying to imply that Dare is one of them, but stating the RSS and REST are cures to enterprise grade problems seems a bit myopic. So, to Dare's point - why is it more complex to do 'enterprise grade' over 'web grade'? This is the million dollar (or perhaps billion dollar) question.

Of course I have my views, but what are yours? Send me your thoughts jschneider-at-momentumsi.com and I'll recompile for publishing. My gut tells me that there is a pretty good argument to be had here - if Dare is right, I want to be the first to advise my customers. If he's wrong, well - I want to advise my customer of that too!

Friday, March 24, 2006

I was playing with Google Finance:http://www.google.com/finance?q=WEBM and realized that the what used to be a static html page was now a highly interactive application. Of course, I am referencing all of the AJAX functionality that has been added. In many of our current AJAX apps, the focus has been to convert classic applications like email, word processing and spreadsheets into Web 2.0 apps.

The conversion of 'traditional' web pages to interactive apps deserves special attention. This is the science of blending information based on context, degrees of separation and providing the ability to quickly pivot the view. It seems as though there is a point where a web page is no longer really a web page but rather an contextually bound application. The art of blending information, informational views, navigation and functionality will likely be a critical talent of the next gen application developer.

I'm starting to move away from the term "SOA" - I'm slowly starting to replace it with more specific terms. One is 'Client Service Computing', which focuses on a real simple use of clients to consume services (or composite services).

A second term that I've been using is "Service Network Computing" which focuses on the plumbing that makes hokey Web 2.0 applications capable of performing 'business critical' applications.

One of the overarching themes of the Web 2.0 discussion we've had today focused on "Putting the User at the Center of the Universe". I wanted to make sure that we didn't leave off the other competing interests.

We always have to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the user. Our next generation architectures will be funded to enable next generation products, services, business models and value chains. And both User and Business will have architectural requirements which must be met. Perhaps taking a secondary seat is the needs of the developer. The hokey use of DHTML, AJAX, etc. perhaps is the most obvious indicator - we're jumping though hoops to meet the needs of users and business - IMHO, the way it should be until we get next-generation tooling.

I'm attending the Spark conference - a Microsoft sponsored event to discuss SOA, Software as a Service and Web 2.0.

The conversation has been a bit chaotic. It is clear that we are covering a lot of ground - perhaps too much ground. Architecting the future using terminology that is not baked isn't easy. All of the participants come from different backgrounds and have different views of what SOA is - what SaaS is - what Web 2.0 is. And no, we weren't able to find the silver bullet. I think we did make progress in finding some common ground about what is 'new' and 'different'.

The conversation has inspired a few thoughts around the aforementioned subjects. Again - no answers - perhaps more questions.

One of the discussion topics was Web 2.0 - although there was no conclusion on the tenets/philosophies of Web 2.0 a handful of attributes were repeated: User Centric, Self Service, Collaborative, Participative, Communal Organization, Lately Bound Composition, etc. This led to yet another discussion about lack of 'mission critical' capabilities of the Web 2.0 and started the discussion of Web 3.0 - perhaps focusing more on the needs of the corporation. I put together the following illustration as a way to frame a discussion around the Web X.0: What are the technical barriers?What were the technical enablers?What new capability did this enable the user or business?